PHP 7 at a Glance

PHP7 is on it’s way! This is the largest shift in the PHP landscape since the upgrade to PHP 5.3. Most of us survived that and I’m sure we will survive this one as well.

To help you see the forrest for the trees, I’ve put together a list of all the RFCs that are marked as “Implemented” on the PHP wiki. Some of them have not yet been updated to “Implemented” status and there are still others in the “Pending Implementation” section.

The sections, “Classification”, “BC Break”, and “Impact” are subjective.

Backwards Compatibility (BC) Break

A lot of the RFCs to not break BC at all. The rest of them are labeled “Possible”. This is because there are no RFCs in this list that are guaranteed to break your code. Most of them labeled “Possible” will affect edge-cases but not the main body of your code.

I asked one Framework Architect recently how they were instructing their users on converting their code to PHP 7 and their answer was this.

How can you tell if you code will be affected? Download a PHP 7 “Nightly Build” compile and try your code on it.

Impact

Impact was harder to guess. This is not the impact of the change on your code, it is the impact of the change on PHP developers in general. I tried to look at each RFC objectively and decide how much it would impact their style of coding or the execution of their code. Most of the changes, as you can see, are low, however, several of the Engine changes have a high impact. The PHPNG, and Exceptions in the Engine are two examples, the first won’t change how you code but it will impact the execution of your code. The second will change how you build applications.

The entire chart is presented for you below to digest. However, here are a few subsets of the data.

About Cal Evans

Many moons ago, at the tender age of 14, Cal touched his first computer. (We're using the term "computer" loosely here, it was a TRS-80 Model 1) Since then his life has never been the same. He graduated from TRS-80s to Commodores and eventually to IBM PCs.
For the past 10 years, Cal has worked with PHP and MySQL on Linux OSX, and when necessary, Windows. He has built on a variety of projects ranging in size from simple web pages to multi-million dollar web applications. When not banging his head on his monitor, attempting a blood sacrifice to get a particular piece of code working, he enjoys building and managing development teams using his widely imitated but never patented management style of "management by wandering around".
Cal is happily married to wife 1.33, the lovely and talented Kathy. Together they have 2 kids who were both bright enough not to pursue a career in IT.
Cal blogs at http://blog.calevans.com and is the founder and host of Nomad PHP

[…] PHP7 at a Glance from none other than Zend is yet another excellent overview. It features all the RFCs listed with their potential impact on a developer’s life plus the chances of BC breaks (there are some in edge cases, but none certain). […]